Apply the magic stick of ‘Make It A Toggle!!!’ I’d say that them just being easter eggs is fine. Cross-integration of saves would get weird. More relevantly, I’d reckon that most players probably do runs in series rather than in parallel, w
I really like how you’ve presented these. It feels like a copypasta. It’s wonderful.
Not sure why but all these extinction event notes Poodelicus posted seem like they were written by an AI to me.
Meteorites don’t end games. Neither does abductions. Being the one that is abducted can be a bummer though because you probably can’t escape from a spaceship with an aware stage creature and since you only control one creature, losing it would decrease your auto evo score.
Aliens shouldn’t want to settle in your planet because it would prevent you from creating a society. And they also shouldn’t uplift you because then the game would be very boring. They should only take wildlife samples. Alien invasions should only happen if they are beatable. So, the industrial stage or later.
Meteors don’t release gasses to the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years but volcanos can. I think deccan traps killed the dinosaurs. The devonian extinction may be caused by a supernova. Loss of the ozone layer too is a somewhat long lasting event.
what
There are two things that need to be considered. Simultaneity and missing co-ocurrence.
If you play as two space stage civs at the same time, and they’ve met each other, and they, say, have a war, you can only control one of them, right? What happens to the other one? When you enter it again, you get a message detailing what happened when the other game was overriding this game file? What happens during the war? An AI controls the civ that you weren’t controlling? Maybe you should be able to leave notes for the AI. “follow this strategy in case of attack. start trade with strangers rather than attacking them first” So that you can leave the game, send the save file to a friend, bet that they can’t defeat the civ you created even when you aren’t there, etc.
Did I previously said anything similar in another thread? I don’t remember.
The second problem is, how do you enter space stage at the same time with different save files? If you want to make them meet? If you evolve for 10 generations in one game, and 20 generations in another, is the beginning of the second one pushed further into the past to place their ends to the same time? That would work, except in one scenerio. If you enter space stage in game A and visit the planets B and C, you uplift the species in planet B and build alien looking cities, give a mass extinction to planet C and build the same alien looking cities, when you open the game B, you can enter space stage immediately, but when you open game C, if you evolve for a few more generations and then enter space stage, the alien cities would be archeologic ruins, it wouldn’t make sense to be able to meet with civilisation B, there are landmarks that are supposed to exist in different times. Civilisation A prevented you two from meeting. And it wouldn’t make any sense for A and C to meet because A could destroy C’s planet and that would cause a grandfather paradox. The first intervention changes C’s gamefile and the second one invalidates everything you did between loading C and then loading A again.
Different gamefiles could be let to interact with each other by pushing their start dates into the past, this would make their time they exist in the galaxy ambigious. And the place of their star system in the can be made not ambigious. But, I think their position should also be ambigious. Before space stage, when you create a game, it should only create a solar system. It shouldn’t create a galaxy. The placement of the stars in the background should be random. The opening screen shouldn’t include the whole galaxy like in spore. It should only show the planet.
In space stage, it should start showing the whole galaxy and you should be able to start in any star system that you own. When you enter space stage in a new game (or industrial. or awakening. different stages can be choosen for that) and you have another space stage save file, the game should ask you “do you want to merge these files or create a second galaxy for the second one?” If chosen “merge”, then that planets star system should be placed to a random part of the galaxy that wasn’t discovered by the previous save file.
What if you explored the whole galaxy? Too bad. You can’t add a new player to it. It shouldn’t ask “merge?”. I think I once red in spore wiki that if you ran out of discovered planets but you tried to get a galactic adventure, the game would turn an already discovered planet into adventure planets. But it doesn’t make sense. You saw it once, it should remain that way. And also, maybe discovering the telescope technology shouldn’t give you the list of all planets around every star. It could be better if you had more freedom and your thrivepedia could download new planets and seed them into your galaxy as you’re discovering it, not limiting the creations to the time when you started space stage. Or maybe showing the planet masses is okay and you can seed the life later.
There should be two types of interactions between different saves. Mergers and easter eggs. So yes, both. In easter eggs, a copy of the players planet should be seeded to a galaxy, like all the other planets in thrivepedia. It shouldn’t effect the save file. Galaxies are large, so it can be possible to place 20 planets you created before to a new galaxy you created. That can be what determines the “merge?” factor. If the the player rejects the merge, or it becomes impossible due to no other planet with the same mass, day lenght, etc remaining in the galaxy, then its copy can be placed instead. The era of it doesn’t matter. It can be placed during its boring billion, cambrian explosion, or a later era. It can be random. It can have player’s species having formed a civ, another species having did that or it can be a colony of a different space empire. It can even be in an alternate future, auto evo having created new species.
And there is also the possibility of having multiple copies. If you played on earth, would you want to see a planet in another part of the galaxy that had dinosaurs? Would it look too sus? They could have alternate plate tectonics, so the planets could look different, have different continents. Can we even call them the same planet at that point? What about creating a new copy of your planet after each generation, ever wondered what that microbe with the weird cell envelope would evolve into if you didn’t caused it to go extinct at the beginning of the game? Planets need to have a real past, because otherwise the species in its ecosystems wouldn’t be compatible or similar. But do you think, does it matter to you that two different planets at different places of the galaxy having the exact same past?
Should there be fossils in planets? Should this only happen before fossils become a thing? Should fossils only be recent? Mammoth bones, no dinosaur bones?
I should say that deja vu was my favorite spore achievement. It gives a weird good feeling. The other good one was when I was thrown by an epic and accidentally got flight of the bumblebee. So, I would like seeing a lot of possible alternate future variations of the species I created in thrive and species I saw around me. Auto evo stops running when we enter awakening, right? Why not keep using it for alternate futures in the background?
Are we sure if all this would be good enough to justify the effort needed to code it into the game?
Auto evo already exists. It wouldn’t need a new code. Would it make the game slower? Does the game get more complex in post evolution stages? I hope not.
“inter-save interaction” I forgot about the main menu, seeding planets and saves merging. I hope it is good enough.
You would still need to code in all the inter-save interaction stuff
And respond to bug reports from players whose saves get ruined by their other games.
And not to even consider what should be done if someone has like 12 saves from a single game, what the actual belgium would you do to sensibly show those in other games and how you’d apply back any change?
Perhaps I phrased that poorly. It’s my understanding that the seismic activity of Pangaea breaking up caused heavy volcanic activity, warming the planet, and also flooded the desert that had been in the middle of it, and that those were the causes of the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event.
To my awareness the causes of that extinction event are not yet fully known as of the present.
There is strong evidence of rapid, intermittent, epicontinental sea anoxia, most likely caused by eutrophication.
While there is evidence of Ozone depletion, there is no evidence either way for a Super Nova. It is just one possible cause of Ozone depletion, which may or may not have contributed in the extinction. There is evidence that Insects and Plants had already colonized the the land by that point, but that that particular mass extinction was mostly if not entirely confined to marine life.
Please correct me if you think I am wrong, but wouldn’t a Super Nova and/or Ozone depletion have effected more than just shallow seas if life was already on land?
But they do throw “dust” and “soot” into the air. Volcanic Winter’s and Impact Winter’s, while caused by different things, both result in blocking the sun.
Also, it been suggested that the worst of the Deccan Traps were a side-effect of the Meteor Impact.
Even if a supernova didn’t cause an extinction on Earth, they are still surely capable of doing so.
True, it just seems low likely hood of being the main cause that particular one.
Speaking of the “one universe” now, should the player be able to somehow have the species from their different saves fight against eachother in a simulated environment?